Yang-Mills Connections on Nonorientable Surfaces

A maximally supersymmetric configuration of super Yang-Mills living on a noncommutative torus corresponds to a constant curvature connection. On a noncommutative toroidal orbifold there is an additional constraint that the connection be equivariant. We study moduli spaces of (equivariant) constant curvature connections on noncommutative even-dimensional tori and on toroidal orbifolds. As an illustration we work out the cases of Z_{2} and Z_{4} orbifolds in detail. The results...

Contribution to the Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians 1994. We review recent developments in the physics and mathematics of Yang-Mills theory in two dimensional spacetimes. This is a condensed version of a forthcoming review by S. Cordes, G. Moore, and S. Ramgoolam.

The geometry of submanifolds is intimately related to the theory of functions and vector bundles. It has been of fundamental importance to find out how those two objects interact in many geometric and physical problems. A typical example of this relation is that the Picard group of line bundles on an algebraic manifold is isomorphic to the group of divisors, which is generated by holomorphic hypersurfaces modulo linear equivalence. A similar correspondence can be made between...

We study a smooth analogue of jumping curves of a holomorphic vector bundle, and use Yang-Mills theory over $ S ^{2} $ to show that any non-trivial, smooth Hermitian vector bundle $E $ over a smooth simply connected manifold, must have such curves. This is used to give new examples complex manifolds for which a non-trivial holomorphic vector bundle must have jumping curves in the classical sense, (when $c_1 (E)$ is zero). We also use this to give a new proof a theorem of Grom...

I summarize some recent developments in the issue of planar equivalence between supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and its orbifold/orientifold daughters. This talk is based on works carried out in collaboration with Adi Armoni, Sasha Gorsky and Gabriele Veneziano.

We study the connectedness of the moduli space of gauge equivalence classes of flat G-connections on a compact orientable surface or a compact nonorientable surface for a class of compact connected Lie groups. This class includes all the compact, connected, simply connected Lie groups, and some non-semisimple classical groups including U(n) and Spin^C(n).

Yang-Mills theory is growing at the interface between high energy physics and mathematics. It is well known that Yang-Mills theory and Gauge theory in general had a profound impact on the development of modern differential and algebraic geometry. One could quote Donaldson invariants in four dimensional differential topology, Hitchin Kobayashi conjecture relating the existence of Hermitian-Einstein metric on holomorphic bundles over K\"ahler manifolds and Mumford stability in ...

We compute the homotopy type of the moduli space of flat, unitary connections over aspherical surfaces, after stabilizing with respect to the rank of the underlying bundle. Over the orientable surface M^g, we show that this space has the homotopy type of the infinite symmetric product of M^g, generalizing a well-known fact for the torus. Over a non-orientable surface, we show that this space is homotopy equivalent to a disjoint union of two tori, whose common dimension corres...

In this paper, a Riemannian geometry of noncommutative super surfaces is developed which generalizes [4] to the super case. The notions of metric and connections on such noncommutative super surfaces are introduced and it is shown that the connections are metric-compatible and have zero torsion when the super metric is symmetric, giving rise to the corresponding super Riemann curvature. The latter also satisfies the noncommutative super analogue of the first and second Bianch...

This is an expository article on the 1978 Atiyah-Drinfeld-Hitchin-Manin construction of Yang-Mills instanton connections over the 4-sphere.